Deadbeat Bohemians Post: PJ Harvey

Tuesday, August 10

Deadbeat Bohemians Post: PJ Harvey

Folks, I'm now music blogging at a collective called Deadbeat Bohemians because why the fuck not? Now you can learn all about the songs I love without having to go through the inconvenience of asking me. Here's a teaser for my latest post.

BUT WHAT DID HE SAY, PJ?: "YOU SAID SOMETHING" BY PJ HARVEY

Most great pop songs leave you wanting to know more about the story taking place within their allotted three minutes. About how things came to be, where things went after the outro, what the singer was doing during the guitar solo, that kind of thing. Did Gary Numan ever get out of his car? Did the Michael Jackson character in “Billie Jean” secretly think that, yeah, the kid probably was his son? Did Cyndi Lauper’s fun-loving party girl in “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” ever calm the fuck down?

The answers to these questions can’t be known, but they are peripheral to our enjoyment of the song anyway, so though they are fun to ponder, they are ultimately not important. But some songs pose questions that are so central to the song’s appeal that ignoring them is not an option. Such is the case in PJ Harvey’s song “You Said Something” from her 2000 album Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, in which a teasingly undelivered piece of information ensures that a pivotal moment in the relationship between the two main characters remains frustratingly, wonderfully mysterious.